3 Things You Didn’t Know About Dog Food
Our dog’s diet needs almost as much attention as we pay to ours, since its health will depend to a great extent on it. Dog food is a much more complex world than it seems and has many curiosities that can put you on alert if you did not know them beforehand.
Taking a look at the ingredients and nutrients in dog food is just as overwhelming as with human food, as they seem like endless lists of unknown substances to most, but we need not worry, as they have passed almost as many quality controls. like ours.
These are some of the most striking things about our pet’s food that you may not have known about and that will prevent you from putting your hands on your head if you read the components:
Dog food can contain heavy metals
Yes, you read that correctly, but it is nothing negative if they are present in their proper measure. Many natural foods have metals, but they are beneficial to health because their presence is measured in parts per million.
This is good to know because you can imagine the puzzled face when you find out that your pet’s food contains natural metals such as lead, mercury, arsenic or cadmium. It would be logical for you to think that you are giving him real poison, but nothing like that, since the amount is very controlled and in no case will it be harmful to his health.
In fact, eliminating these metals from your pet’s diet is totally impossible, since they are present in the air, water or earth, so they are absorbed by plants and animals in a natural way, and end up in our body and yours.
Ash in dog food
Another component that attracts the most attention when we look at the composition of dog food is that most contain ashes in its composition. This, although it may seem negative, is necessary to maintain the animal’s mineral levels at 100%.
This lack of minerals can cause problems in the bones and other tissues of your pet, in addition to helping to clean the teeth of the animal when it hurts the small pellets of feed. In addition, the ashes contained in the food do not come from any other place than from the incineration of the food itself, at which time only minerals such as iron, zinc or calcium remain, all of them essential for the proper functioning of the body.
In case of not including the ash in the dog’s food, it would suffer development problems in the growth phase and its bones would not achieve the necessary hardness. If, on the contrary, it were administered in excess, it would cause problems in the gastrointestinal tract, damage to the kidneys or urinary crystals.
Problems with excess wet food
Every day it is more common to provide wet food to our pets, the famous cans that they sell in any supermarket, but the reality is that most are not as balanced as they may seem, although the dog prefers them.
In addition, having half of the ash in dry feed, wet food eventually causes dental problems in dogs, since they promote the accumulation of tartar. If you want to give this type of food to your pet, the ideal is to put it in with feed to keep its teeth clean and healthy.
Finally, in the case of dogs with a tendency to be overweight, special attention must be paid to the amount of wet food, since it is more caloric and has a greater amount of fat. Remember! In balance is virtue.
